The Same River Twice by Chris Offutt Page A

Each morning I joined the other workers in public showers at the end of our dead-end lane. At night we drank in the employee bar.
    Washing dishes was the ideal work of freedom, requiring no focus save the immediate cleaning of a mottled pot or plate. It also provided food. The occupation was of such wretched status that no one bothered me. Cooks labored in hundred-degree temperatures, while busboys staggered beneath enormous loads. The best waiters were able to change demeanor extremely fast. Seconds after battling a cook or debasing themselves before a tyrannical boss, they had to be sweetly sensitive to a customer. Bartenders enjoyed a slightly higher rank, but the job entailed steady recruitment and coddling of one’s private circle of alcoholics. The dishwasher, in his perpetually soggy and food-flecked state, could remain true to himself.
    The canyon gift shops employed Hopi women who sold copper-hued plastic dolls dressed in fringed felt. The hollow foot of each bore an inked stamp that read “Made in Japan.” A few yards away was a hole in the ground a mile deep and ten miles wide. Somebody jumped once a month. Every week, a foreign tourist clutching a camera raced through the pines with skunk stench trailing behind. Apparently the Old World has not a polecat to its name. They are cute, graceful creatures, ripe for a photograph. Sometimes an entire family received the spray.
    After supper I watched the sunset from the canyon’s rim, sitting on the narrowest lip of rock protruding over the hole. I wrote in my diary there, looking down on clouds, trying to understand the strange impulse to step into space. It was not death that pulled me, it was the canyon itself. A jump was an urge to fill the void. Just before dusk, I witnessed an electrical storm from above, actually seeing the ignition of lightning and smelling the discharge. A sudden lance of fire cracked into the canyon’s bowels and disappeared. The air smelled of ozone. It cured me of the itch to jump.
    Weekends, I walked to the bottom where the Colorado River continued to cut a path. The river has never actually sunk but remains in place, cutting the land as the earth rises against the water. My treks down were a passage backwards through time, descending through millennia layered in the geology of the canyon walls. Color marked each era. Red at the top faded to pink, brown, a delicate green, and finally the slates and violets of the bottom. Naturally there was a bar and restaurant beside the river. Every Sunday, I climbed out to my work.
    I was the only dishwasher who was not black, Mexican, or Indian. We worked in teams posted at either end of a colossal automatic washer and rinser. One man fed the beast while two others stacked the clean plates. A fourth dried silverware. Since I was new, my chore was the worst—scraping food into plastic barrels. I saved the good parts to divide later among the crew. Willie, the head cook, offered me a job as short-order breakfast cook. I refused, preferring the simple world of water and dishes. Willie didn’t quite understand this. Each day, he asked if I’d changed my mind yet. He eventually offered a higher wage, but I remained loyal to freedom.
    A new manager was shifted to the restaurant, a sneering spud named Jackie Jr. Like many dwellers of the West, he pretended to be a cowboy, in hand-tooled boots, expensive hats, and tailored shirts with pearl snaps. Accustomed to calling all dishwashers “boy,” Jackie Jr. enjoyed referring to me as a “hillbilly,” a term that put me off my feed. Hillbilly was what the people in town called us at home; that and worse—hick, ridgerunner, redneck, inbred ingrate, and my personal favorite, pigfucker. My mother is my sixth cousin. My brother and sister are also my cousins but nobody in my family ever seduced a hog.
    I decided to quit after a week beneath the rule of Jackie Jr. On my final shift, he sauntered through the kitchen,